La bouche pleine de terre: Branimir Šćepanović

Translated from Serbian into French by Jean Descat, and into English by Lovett Fielding EdwardsPublished by Éditions L'Age d'Homme, 1975, 84 pages. English version published by Longship Press, 1980, 83 pages. Original version published in 1974. Although this book exists in English (as The Mouth Full of Earth), it is out of print. But I …

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Tombland: C.J. Sansom

Published by Pan / Mulholland Books / Mantle, 2018, 880 pages. I wasn’t going to write this, since I’ve already reviewed a book in the Shardlake series (Dark Fire). But Tombland is a little different—it is not just a murder mystery but also describes a little-known event in English history. The series centres around Matthew …

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The Book of Dust, Book 1: La Belle Sauvage—Philip Pullman

Published by Penguin Random House, 2017, 560 pages. A mysterious substance called Dust; the alethiometer, an instrument that can reveal the truth; and daemons, animal-shaped manifestations of people’s inner selves: we are in familiar territory, the world of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials. Almost 20 years after the last book in the trilogy was …

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The Red-Haired Woman: Orhan Pamuk

Translated from Turkish by Ekin OklapPublished by Faber & Faber, 2017, 272 pages. Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel is about obsession, guilt and the destructive relations between fathers and sons. The novel is narrated by Cem, looking back on himself as a 16-year-old boy. His father, a pharmacist and a communist, is often absent—he is either …

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